OneDrive for Business brings better SharePoint Online integration

29th September 2016

Microsoft want to help businesses integrate their OneDrive and SharePoint use, making it simple for people to move files between both and use Microsoft Graph to find relevant documents. These changes improve customer experiences across relevant Microsoft Office 365 Business plans or Office 365 Enterprise offerings (e.g. E1, E3, E5).

As part of this ongoing strategy, at Ignite 2016, Microsoft announced new versions of OneDrive for Business for desktop, mobile, and web, with SharePoint integration.

New desktop sync features

New sync features, available as a preview now, in OneDrive for Business are:

Share SharePoint Online document libraries and OneDrive folders

A new 'activity centre' to view synchronisation and file activity

New browser features

New browser features are rolling out by the end of 2016:

Thumbnails and rich previews for over 20 new file types (including Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, .eps, .msg, .eml, and most photo or video streaming formats - even many RAW formats)

Access, edit, and share all the files and folders you own or follow in SharePoint Online

Download multiple files as a zip archive

New mobile features

Improvements for OneDrive mobile apps on iOS and Android are available from today:

Notifications when a file is shared with you

Access SharePoint Online within the Android OneDrive app

Multi-page scanning within the Android OneDrive app

See how many people have discovered and viewed your files within the iOS app

Beyond the changes to OneDrive for Business, Microsoft are improving integration with Office 2016 and enhancing the feature set for IT pros before the end of 2016.

New Office 2016 features

Better integration between Microsoft Office and OneDrive for Business mean when you open a file in an Office app you can tell in the Office 2016 ribbon who is also editing the document. You can then launch Skype for Business to chat instantly with your colleague about changes to the file.

New IT pro features

IT admins will be able to set storage quotas and external sharing permissions on a per-user basis within the Office 365 User Management console. Should a user lose their mobile device you can instantly sign them out of OneDrive and when an employee leaves you can move or copy their OneDrive files to another location.

These changes improve how employees use OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Office 365. Delivering better integration between the services.